Recycled Christmas trees help beautify highways

A bulldozer turns a commercial compost pile. High temperatures in the pile kill pathogens and weed seeds.

A bulldozer turns a commercial compost pile. High temperatures in the pile kill pathogens and weed seeds.

Photo: Courtesy Photo / John Ferguson Of Nature's Way Resources

Photo: Courtesy Photo / John Ferguson Of Nature's Way Resources

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A bulldozer turns a commercial compost pile. High temperatures in the pile kill pathogens and weed seeds.

A bulldozer turns a commercial compost pile. High temperatures in the pile kill pathogens and weed seeds.

Photo: Courtesy Photo / John Ferguson Of Nature's Way Resources

Recycled Christmas trees help beautify highways

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As you take down the Christmas tree, take a moment to imagine its next incarnation: Chipped up and mixed into soil, it might soon secure new grasses along some South Texas highway or sustain vegetable sprouts in someone's garden.

Adding weathered plant material back into the soil is becoming the norm for a growing number of people who are buying and using mulch and compost.

While San Antonio has for years been turning brush into mulch and offering the compost at a minimal cost to residents, other cities are catching on.

Two decades ago Houston offered only a couple of places to buy it; now there are more than 60. Beyond buying, more people are learning how to make compost themselves from clipped grass and wilted vegetables.

“We are in a high growth mode and poised to steamroll,” said Michael Virga, executive director of the U.S. Compost Council, which plans to debut a campaign this spring with a message aimed at landscapers, green builders and the public about soil quality and the importance of recycling food.

“Compost Camp” is offered by the State of Texas Alliance for Recycling. Urban Harvest, the Houston gardening nonprofit, offers classes in compost and soil.

San Antonio has offered mulch for a minimal cost per pound from its brush pickup sites for many years and accepts undecorated cut Christmas trees at locations around the city after each holiday season.

This year, Christmas trees can be dropped off from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and again on Jan. 12 and 13. The Bitters Road and Nelson Gardens brush sites will take trees all month. After the trees are ground into mulch, residents can return to the drop-off location and pick up mulch for free while supplies last.

Beneficial fungi

Soil is supposed to contain more than tiny bits of rock, clay and sand. That's only the building block. Soil needs plant material in various stages of decay to feed plants and hold soil so it doesn't float away in the first heavy rain. To be complete, soil also requires bacteria and fungi that colonize plant matter and break it down, releasing a trove of nutrients in the process.

For John Ferguson, who now finds himself surrounded by warm piles of live soil, the “aha” moment came long after a master's degree in physics, even courses in soil science.

He got sick while using the fungicide Captan. Fungicides kill unwanted pests, but they also kill beneficial fungi. Fungi play a fundamental role in unlocking nitrogen, a primary plant food.

When Ferguson realized the importance of natural plant decay in soil, he tried to buy compost. But not enough people were making it, so he began producing it himself and now owns Nature's Way Resources in Conroe.

Twenty-three states have banned organic material in landfills. Often they are places where landfill space is scarce.

But Texas is long on land, and disposal fees at landfills are comparatively cheap. Watts thinks this doesn't matter, because Texans are ready for a more sophisticated understanding of the reason to compost.

“Saying that we're running out of landfill space as a reason to compost is like saying we are running out of graveyard space as a reason to cure disease,” he said. “It's not the land you're trying to save, it's the material that is going into the ground.”

Composting has grown significantly in Texas for a different reason, and it has a lot to do with the Texas Department of Transportation. It has become, it believes, the single largest purchaser of compost in the country.

Driven by TxDOT

In 1985, landscape architect Barrie Cogburn tried to help TxDOT determine why its freshly graded slopes so frequently slumped away in the rain, taking with them the department's expensive plantings. Cogburn noticed that new topsoil brought in by subcontractors was often little more than finely ground rock.

At a workshop she learned just how much organic material was ending up in Texas landfills.

“They have too much, and we don't have enough,” she thought. “There has to be a way to come together on this.”

Cogburn and Scott McCoy of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality teamed up in an experiment adding compost to TxDOT's soil. They also added dairy manure that was piling up in Bosque County, polluting water all the way downstream to Waco.

The results were favorable: TxDOT embankments started staying in place. And the organic material retained water, so the department had to irrigate less. The practice is now widespread.

Drought, hardpan, climate change predictions, soil depletion, the current popularity of gardening all point the same direction. Ferguson puts it this way: “We have got to get it out of our landfills, and get it back into our soils.”